I had two new arrivals this week. First, a combination of Barrister and Mann and Spearhead goodies reached me:

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Fleur de France is a favourite of mine and I was super lucky to get a backup tub and splash of this discontinued scent in the Spearhead anniversary giveaway. Added bonus, it’s in my favourite base, 20.1. I also bought a backup frag, since it seems very unlikely to ever be made again.

I already have and like Nocturne in the Zslur version, but I’m uneasy using their ill-named products, so the recent BaM re-edition was the perfect opportunity to further dezingify my den.

The surprise star of this part of the mail call is Roam Two though! I have OG Roam in the Soft Hearts base (including the finger balm that’s going iffy). I love its deep dirty grass scent. I first smelled it as a kid, maybe 11 or 12 years old, when I went on my first spring tent camp with my scout group (before that, I was a cub and the camps were in huts and houses, not in tents). We had set up our tents on a friendly farmer’s pasture in the Jura mountains at the edge of the forest and near a little stream. I was in the team that built and maintained the kitchen tent, and after the second day it started raining and never stopped. Everything turned to mud, the wet grass between the tents got trampled down and its scent combined with the smoky tarp of the kitchen tent is OG Roam. I love the scent, but it’s not the most wearable in an office setup. When I read that Roam Two is significantly different, I was both worried and hopeful. Worried it might have lost what triggers happy memories for me, hopeful it might be a more wearable fragrance. Well, Will knocked it out of the park! It still has that wonderful outdoorsy feel, but the smoke and dirt are less prominent. It now feels outdoorsy in a similar way as Shire or Valedictorian do. Yayy!

Second, I got this pretty Mühle Purist brush with an ebonite handle as a total blind buy:

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I had been on the fence about this for a while and posted questions about Mühle badger experiences all around, but got no feedback. There are only very few users of these brushes in the forums I know. My first shave brush was a Mühle travel brush with a tiny synthetic knot and it was bad. As I went down the rabbit hole of wetshaving, I switched to bigger synths, badgers, boars, and horse knots and I haven’t looked back. I often wondered how it was possible that Mühle kept selling these tiny knots. This particular badger knot has a 21 mm diameter, and they call that the “medium” size. And it’s not like these are cheap, either. Apparently, there is a market for these somewhere. When this brush came on a big discount I threw caution to the wind and got it. Let’s see whether there’s something to tiny German badgers.